(September 24th) KIDFest Maker Faire

On September 24, 2017, The Blair Robot Project took our robot, Calcifer, to the KIDFest Maker Faire to demonstrate what we created over the past year.

KIDFest Maker Faire, hosted by Kid Museum and held in the Silver Spring Civic Building, is a convention full of different types of inventors, from artisans to hackers. Each presenter has their own little booth with hands-on activities for children to engage with. In our case, it was the robot itself.

We set up Calcifer’s rope climbing system and temporarily switched him to a slower safe driving option developed by our programming team in preparation for the children.

When we arrived at the scene, we were greeted by the friendly faces of our neighboring team: Walt Whitman High School’s Team 1389, The Body Electric. Thanks to the safer driving program, our robot was able to drive alongside Team 1389 without any accidents.

All day, bright eyed children piled into lines to interact with the robots. They especially loved to test out our climbing mechanism, which hoisted the one hundred and twenty pound robot completely into the air!

We received endless streams of questions from both the children, asking how we made it, and the parents, asking how our team worked together. We also had several groups of energetic middle school children filled with excitement at the prospect of joining our team in the future!

Seeing such enthusiasm over our machine was one of the most rewarding moments of the convention. Overall, Team 449 is so thankful that we were given the opportunity to inspire the next generation of engineers and creators, and demonstrate Calcifer the robot to our receptive community.